Can you believe these titles?

In The Green Man Review, Michael M. Jones concludes that my newest novel, ‘Midnight at Spanish Gardens‘, is “intriguing, frustrating, magical, literary, and slippery when you try to wrap your mind around it.“

The novel’s story set up is simple, if a bit… unusual. Five friends meeting up twenty years after college, are individually issued a strange invitation by a mysterious bartender — to live an alternate life, and then have to choose which life to stay with.

“In these five stories which intertwine with one another against a thought-provoking framing sequence,” Michael Jones writes, “Alma Alexander plays a complicated game of possibilities and potentials. She explores gender and sexuality, family and legacy, metaphysics and philosophy. Character-driven and atmospheric, Midnight at Spanish Gardens is as fascinating as it is tricky to pin down.”

He concludes that, “While it may not be for everyone, it’s an excellent tale that defies easy classification, and a genuine overlooked treasure.”

The simple poem below was written by an unknown woman but has now been brought to life through the art of a Chinese cartoonist. All that’s really known about the poem is the title; “But You Didn’t”, it’s a real tear jerker of a story.

“Way back before The Sopranos made people angry/confused for cutting to black out of nowhere,” Gabe Habash writes in Publihers Weekly, “books were messing with the heads of readers by daring to not use a period as the last typeset keystroke on the very last page. Here are 12 books that have no need for the standard last punctuation mark. Habash regrets the lack of books by female authors, but says he couldn’t find one “in hours and hours of searching.”

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, by Laurence Sterne (1768)

The Ending:

–But the Fille de Chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet, and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanced so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me–

So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s–

Why:

At the end of his rambling journey, Yorick finally ends up at a roadside inn. Because there is only one bedroom, he shares it with a lady and her chambermaid, under the condition that he not speak. Of course, he breaks this rule and gets the chambermaid heading toward him. It’s possible, grammatically, to read that Yorick stretches out his hand and catches hold of the chambermaid’s hand. But, given that this is Sterne, the dirtier option is a lot more enjoyable.

Ralph Ellison was perhaps most famous for his 1952 existentialist novel, Invisible Man, which touched upon issues facing African-Americans, as told through one man’s search for his identity in New York City during the 1930s. Ellison’s use of the nameless protagonist echoes themes of social blindness throughout the novel.

Alison Nastasi tells us in Flavorwire about similar voices in literature.

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

We never learn the “lovely and unusual name” of English author Daphne du Maurier’s narrator — the second wife of wealthy widower, Maxim de Winter. The De Winter home is dominated by the memory of his late wife Rebecca, whose presence is preserved by the family’s sinister servant — a taunting housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. The new Mrs. De Winter remains symbolically nameless, she herself as much of a ghost as the specter of Rebecca who “haunts” the Manderley estate.

Artists around the world have long been inspired by the works of Old Masters like Rembrandt, Raphael and Vermeer, Ritesh Saini writes for Light Stalking. When Australian photographer Bill Gekas wanted to recreate the style through his photographs, Saini says, he chose to feature his five-year-old daughter Athena as the subject.

I think that they are all utterly magnificent works of art. But some are full of whimsy; chess with Bugs Bunny is a purely Alice-in-Wonderland shot.